402 



IRELAND. 



Bothachs or Cottiers, who held a right of set- 

 tlement, probably as all that remained to them 

 of their share of communal property; a second 

 class, the Sincleithe, the descendants of mer- 

 cenaries or prisoners who " had acquired a 

 right of settlement," possibly through the anal- 

 ogy of their condition to that of the Cottiers ; 

 a third class, the Fuidir?, foreigners, who might 

 gain a right of settlement by forfeiting their 

 rights as freemen. Service under two succes- 

 sive lords, however, regained for them their 

 forfeited right. The tenants upon the remain- 

 der of the landed estates were of two kinds, 

 called Saer Ceili and Daer Ceili that is, free- 

 tenant and base-tenant. The relation of the 

 former to the noble was analogous to that of 

 knights' service in feudal laws, and of the lat- 

 ter to common socage. These tenants, as well 

 as the laborers upon the demesne land, held 

 rights in their tenements which the common 

 law protected against the encroachments of the 

 nobility. Thus this right of security in tenure 

 has for Ireland the sacredness of antiquity. 

 Though modified by the successive conquests 

 and settlements, the idea of property in his 

 holding has never been entirely uprooted from 

 the mind of the peasant. Yet previous to 1870 

 this idea had a practical influence only in the 

 province of Ulster ; in the three other provinces 

 it had given way to the successive encroach- 

 ments of landlords. As the legislative or stat- 

 utory power was in the hands of landlords or 

 landlord sympathizers, theseencroachments had 

 been legalized in various ways. Three acts ot 

 Parliament may be cited which took away 

 rights from the Irish peasant which he believed 

 himself to possess by the authority of the com- 

 mon law. The first provided that, should a 

 tenant resort to legal procedure to prove un- 

 founded the claim of a landlord, and lose his 

 case, he should be fined twice the costs. By 

 another act, Parliament refused to recognize 

 the right given to the tenant by the common 

 law, according to which a standing or growing 

 crop was considered part of the soil, and the 

 landlord, although holding a judgment against 

 his tenant, could not seize it. Parliament em- 

 powered the landlord to send his helper to take 

 possession of the field and bear away the crop 

 when ripe. As another innovation, Parliament 

 granted to the landlord "power of evicting his 

 tenant for non-payment of rent, and of recov- 

 ering possession of the land in cases in which 

 he was not entitled to this remedy by the forms 

 of his contract or by the rules of common 

 law." Thus the Irish landlords obtained rem- 

 edies unknown to those of England or Scot- 

 land. The third of the above enactments pro- 

 duced the greatest grievance. This, as inter- 

 preted and practiced, came to mean the right 

 on the part of the landlord to evict a tenant 

 at will. It was not until the time of George I 

 that anything like eviction, even for non-pay- 

 ment of rent, was recognized, and to the tenant, 

 who was now for the first time deprived of all 

 property right in his holding, it was really con- 



fiscation. A different system of land-tenure 

 was adopted by the northern province of Ire- 

 land, which is commonly known as the Ulster 

 Right or Ulster Custom. So far as the tenant 

 is concerned it secured to him three rights: 1. 

 Security of tenure as long as the rent was paid 

 and no injurious mode of farming followed. 2. 

 The right to sell his holding at will, together 

 with improvements put upon the farm, to any 

 person approved by the landlord. 3 . Rent could 

 not be determined by competition but by valua- 

 tion. Under this system of tenure Ulster has 

 become by far the most prosperous of the four 

 provinces of Ireland. In the three other prov- 

 inces " competitive rents " have been paid for 

 generations. By that term is meant that farms 

 were advertised and let out at the rent offered 

 by the highest bidder. This custom placed the 

 culture of the land in the hands of shiftless and 

 dishonest peasants, and forced those who would 

 be thrifty to become as shiftless as their neigh- 

 bors. For a few years previous to the Glad- 

 stone Land Act of 1870, the land-tenure ques- 

 tion had been brought prominently into notice, 

 as well by the great economic changes that 

 were taking place as by agitation of agricul- 

 tural grievances. In 1870, of the entire extent 

 of the island, one half was given to pasture- 

 land, nearly one fourth was bog or waste land, 

 and a little more than one quarter under culti- 

 vation. According to Cliffe Leslie, between 

 1861 and 1869, 1,398,000 acres of land have gone 

 out of cultivation, the crop-land being convert- 

 ed into pasture, but there had been no increase 

 of pastural products corresponding to the in- 

 crease of pasture-land. For while in 1859 the 

 number of horses had been 629,075, of cattle 

 3,815,598, and of pigs 1,265,751, there were 

 in 1869 only 527,248 horses, 3,727,097 cattle, 

 and 1,079,793 pigs. In about three fourths of 

 the island, says Mr. Leslie, we find " hardly 

 a town or village whose trade and population 

 have not decreased in the last twenty years " ; 

 indeed, "but few which are not in a state of 

 complete decay, in spite of the auxiliaries to 

 town industry, mechanical, chemical, and in- 

 tellectual, which those twenty years have cre- 

 ated." This system of tenure Mr. Gladstone, 

 in 1870, tried to reform by his Land Act. It 

 contained two principles: 1. The recognition 

 of the Ulster Custom as embracing the sanctity 

 of law in Ulster, and as desirable for the whole 

 island. 2. The recognition of the superiority 

 of peasant proprietorship over any form of 

 tenantry whatever, and the right of the Gov- 

 ernment to aid peasants to become holders in 

 fee- simple. The act did not carefully define 

 the Ulster Custom legalized by Parliament, 

 " but the framing of an accurate definition ap- 

 peared so difficult," as Mr. Gladstone afterward 

 declared, " that it was considered best to confide 

 that duty to the courts of law." A decision in 

 the case of Graham vs. Earl of Erne, declared 

 that custom to embody the following points : 

 1. " The right or custom in general of yearly 

 tenants, or those deriving through them, to 



